(Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
In sport these wage rises usually jump by huge amounts, John Barnes was the highest paid player in England in 1988, earning £10k per week. Move on ten years and the average wage for an elite player was £50k per week. Ten years on again, and that figure had reached £100k per week.
The way things are going with Real now, in six years time their highest paid players will be Ronaldo and Kaka, the Portuguese winger earning an astonishing £653,125 per week, which will have risen from £125,000 in his first year.
I guarantee that inflation will not have risen by that much in that short time span, so the average industrial wage in six years will probably have risen from around £400 per week to £500, at a very liberal inflation rate.
So it begs the question, where will Real get the money from?
Ticket prices and merchandise will definitely rise, sponsorship too. But the real place where money is made is through television revenue. But to make the maximum possible from TV, Real need to win trophies.
All Madrid have done is take the financial model that the top four teams in the Premiership use, and with a bigger fan base, bigger sponsorship deals, and bigger TV deals, Madrid have been able to take that model and expand it, extravagantly.
Whether it will work in the long run is anyone's guess.
The last Galacticos, led by Perez, only won one major trophy in five years. But their revenue went through the roof. The year before David Beckham joined, Madrid had a turnover of £211m, the year after that had risen to £400m.
For the bean counters, this era will probably be a financial success. But for the fans who measure these things by trophy hauls, the jury is still out.
The last era, was a success off the pitch, and a disaster on it.
I know which one matters to the fans, and how they measure success. Does Perez?
50 Comments
Loading more comments...
This comment and all replies have been deleted This comment has been deleted Undo delete